Erich Wolfgang Korngold / Sunday in the Park With George

On this day in classical music: Austrian-born composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold died in Los Angeles at age 60 in 1957. A child prodigy, Korngold completed his first orchestral score, titled the “Schauspiel Overture,” when he was 14. His opera “Die Tote Stadt” (The Dead City) became an international success following its 1920 premiere. In 1934, Korngold was invited to Hollywood to adapt Mendelssohn’s incidental music for his “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for a big screen adaptation. Korngold returned to Austria but was again asked to compose a score for a Hollywood film in 1938. His score for “The Adventures of robin Hood” won an Academy Award. Not long after Korngold’s arrival in California, Hitler annexed Austria which became part of the German Empire. Korngold would later say that writing the “Robin Hood” score saved his life. Korngold also won an Oscar for his score of “Anthony Adverse.” Along with Max Steiner and Alfred Newman, Korngold is considered one of the founders of film music. Listen to an Australian youth orchestra perform the overture to Korngold’s “The Sea Hawk.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIE35ifLIpQ

On this day in the musical theatre: Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” was given a scaled-down revival at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory in 2005. The production incorporated shifting panels on the sides and rear of the stage onto which the story’s changing scenes could be projected. The London production was so successful, winning five Olivier Awards, that it transferred to Broadway with original London leads Daniel Evans (as Georges Seurat) and Jenna Russell (as his mistress Dot). Both earned Olivier awards for their performances and the production took the award for Outstanding Musical Production. Evans and Russell also received Tony nominations for their roles in the Broadway transfer. Listen to Evans and Russell perform “Move On.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYytwiyVRpg

Musical musings: “Look!” says the man for whom seeing is everything, in a voice that both commands and beseeches. “Look!” This directive is issued by the painter Seurat, played by Daniel Evans in the glorious revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George.” And even if George’s mother, to whom he is ostensibly speaking, pays him no mind, we certainly do. How could we not look at the rhapsody of images that keeps unfolding before us? Directed by Sam Buntrock, this production uses 21st-century technology to convey the vision of a 19th-century Pointillist to truly enchanting effect. But in “Sunday in the Park With George,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1985, looking involves much more than registering what’s pretty, what’s shocking, what’s new. The great gift of this production, first staged in London two years ago, is its quiet insistence that looking is the art by which all people shape their lives. As a consequence, a familiar show shimmers with a new humanity and clarity that make theatergoers see it with virgin eyes. And while “Sunday” remains a lopsided piece — pairing a near-perfect, self-contained first act with a lumpier, less assured second half — this production goes further than any I’ve seen in justifying the second act’s existence. Yet thanks in part to the production’s inventive visuals —  including a lovely time-traveling segue — this act has a charm and sensitivity it lacked in earlier incarnations. Also thanks to Mr. Evans and Ms. Russell, a humility. The 20th-century George’s lack of artistic direction feels touchingly of a piece with this second act, which becomes a paean to the process of self-questioning, even when answers are distant at best. That the second act ends as the first does, in a ravishing epiphany of artistic harmony, now feels more than ever like a loving benediction, bestowed by the show’s creators on its audiences. Every member of those audiences, whether consciously or not, is struggling for such harmony in dealing with the mess of daily reality. How generous of this production — and it is the generosity of all great art — that it allows you, for a breathless few moments, to achieve that exquisite, elusive balance. – Ben Brantley in The New York Times writing about the 2008 Broadway transfer of “Sunday in the Park With George”

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